The body east: the proliferation of performance and body art in Asia, often with an implicit political charge, was chronicled in a recent exhibition at the Queens Museum - Import/Export

"Your body is a battleground," Barbara Kruger informed us in one of her most reproduced art works. Kruger was referring to the gender wars that roiled U.S. political discourse in the 1980s, but the history of performance and body art suggests that the statement has much wider ramifications. The recent art history of Europe and America is full of clashes between police and individuals wielding their often naked bodies as art works. Among the most memorable of these incidents was Charlotte Moorman's arrest in 1967 for playing the cello in the nude during a performance with Nam June Paik. Around the same time, the Austrian Actionists became embroiled in repeated confrontations with police for performances which featured public masturbation, self-mutilation and animal slaughter. More recently, photographer-impresario Spencer Tunick has courted periodic arrests on pornography charges by orchestrating naked volunteers for his multi-body tableaux on city streets. Even when no one is sent to jail, bodies in the public arena are extremely controversial, as Renee Cox discovered during the recent Brooklyn Museum uproar set off by her photographic reinterpretation of Leonardo's Last Supper with Cox herself, unclad, as the Christ figure.

Impassioned reactions by police and elected officials to public nudity are often put down to the lingering influence of Puritan body hatred. However it is becoming increasingly apparent that this is not solely a Western phenomenon. A recent exhibition at the Queens Museum devoted to Asian performance and body art made it clear that naked or unruly bodies can be just as disruptive in Asia as they are in the West. Though it was not limited to controversial displays of the body, "Translated Acts: Performance and Body Art from East Asia, 1990-2001" organized by Korean-born, U.S.-based independent curator Yu Yeon Kim, chronicled a surprising number of clashes between Asian artists and the law in their respective countries.

What makes bodies so threatening to the keepers of the civic order? From the evidence of this show, it seems to come down to issues of control. Bodies assembled in large numbers, whatever their ostensible purpose, are an obvious threat to undemocratic governments, as the Chinese authorities' continuing crackdown on Falun Gong demonstrates. But even a small number of individual bodies, doing unauthorized things, can challenge officially sanctioned systems of order. In Asia, as in the West, artists have discovered that body-based acts of violence and endurance, as well as public displays of apparently irrational and absurdist behavior, can counter the oppressions visited upon them, not just by government and social custom, but even by the more general demands of modernity and technology.

This fascinating exhibition, which debuted in Berlin at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt before traveling to New York, provided a variety of explanations for the recent explosion of body and performance art in Asia. Not surprisingly, given the very different histories and political systems in place in Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan, the nations under investigation here, the story changes from country to country. While the exhibition itself mingled works of different geographic origins, the essays in the catalogue by various Asian critics and curators sketch out a set of distinctive narratives that also provide historical background to the exhibition.

The picture that emerges is complex and even contradictory. Sometimes Asian performance art and body art converge with developments in the West. At other moments it grows from local circumstances. It can be, by turns, confrontational and escapist. Sometimes it attempts to effect a reconciliation between apparent opposites.

In Japan, for instance, body art goes back to the immediate post-World War II era when performance-based movements like Gutai and Butoh provided artists with a means to express their criticism of a society unsettled by its recent military defeat. By the 1970s, Japan had entered the international art arena. Looking westward, avant-garde Japanese artists discovered kindred spirits in the developing performance and body art movements. Influences traveled in both directions as figures such as Allan Kaprow and John Cage absorbed and reworked Buddhist ideas about time and chance, while performance-oriented artists such as Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama emerged as important participants in the Western art scene. After a period of retrenchment during the 1980s, Japanese performance and body artists have in recent years begun again to attract international attention through works engaged with the social transformations brought about by technology and consumerism.

A very different situation pertains in mainland China, where communication with the West was sharply curtailed for much of the postwar era. There, body and performance art did not appear until the mid-1980s, when their emergence coincided with a growing demand by younger Chinese for personal and political liberation. This impulse was tragically curtailed by the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, and avant-garde performance art moved from public to private arenas in the 1990s. Artists such as Ma Liuming and Zhang Huan began to self-consciously echo the "extreme art" pioneered in the 1970s by Chris Burden, Vito Acconci and others. After their "East Village Art Colony," a Beijing phenomenon named for its New York counterpart, was closed down by the police in 1995, they shifted their activities increasingly to the international stage. Meanwhile, back in China, certain younger artists began to undertake ever more grotesque scenarios in works which have featured corpses, body parts and raw meat. However, as this show demonstrates, such sensationalistic practices are not the whole story in current Chinese body art, which also includes quieter and more poetic approaches.